Cheetah: Quick as a Flash!
by Atlan
Summary: Ten years after the Justice League is destroyed, Brittany Diggers, the Cheetah, meets her birth mother for the first time, and learns the secrets of the mythical Speed Force!


I don't own The Flash, or Gold Diggers. The Flash is property of DC Comics, and Gold Diggers is owned by the amazing Fred Perry. Seriously, not enough people read his comics. He's pretty damn good.

Thanks to Pat, as normal, for helping me with spelling. You'd think a 3rd year University student should be able to spell on his own, huh?

* * *

Gina Diggers was many things. She was a brilliant inventor- she had dozens of patents. She was an accomplished archeologist- she had made some of the most important finds in the last decade. She was quite sexy- she was on most of the enrollment posters her old university sent out.

But most of all, her sister Brittany decided, she was a nerd. Six- S-I-X PHD's. The girl was quite possibly the biggest nerd in all of existence. Nerdist of the Nerds. Queen Nerd. Nerd-a-tron 6000. Nerd2. El-Nerd-O.

She was also very pokey.

"Damn it, will you stop that?" Brittany roared at Gina.

Literally roared.

After all, Brittany Diggers, Gina's adopted younger sister, was a were-Cheetah.

THE were-Cheetah.

The LAST were-Cheetah.

The whole were-Cheetah tribe had been slaughtered two decades ago, during the war between the were-Wolves and the were-Cheetahs. Doctor Theodore Diggers, too late to save the tribe, had managed to rescue the only survivor. He took little Brittany, only a baby, home to his wife Julia and daughter Gina. She had grown up in a loving, if eccentric, household. This was a good thing- not a lot of parents were equipped to deal with a daughter who, if startled too badly, turned into a kitten the size of a toddler.

As little Brittany had grown up, she had become more mature, both as a human and as a were-Cheetah. She figured out how to change between her (tiny) human form, her (snarly) cheetah form, and her (awesome) hybrid form (but only once a day). In her hybrid form, she stood seven and a half feet tall, her body covered in fur (spotted, like her hair), and had a truly spectacular pair of breasts. She could lift two tones, and run at 200 miles an hour.

Or at least, that used to be the case.

Not two days previously, her father's apprentice had managed to channel her mother's spirit. Not her adopted mother (who, due to a curse, could only appear on earth for one day a year), but her birth mother- Cyan. The first were-Cheetah Brittany had ever met.

There had been tears. There had been hugging. There had even been a birds-and-the-bees talk (well, two of them. One had been about the difficulty of eating a bird and a warning about how unpleasant it was to be stung while eating, and the other had been about the… oddities… in were-Cheetah reproduction.) To make the day even better, there had been a news broadcast about a superhero in Metropolis- WildHorse. After a long talk between the mother and daughter (which involved everything from her upbringing to her boyfriend- and the prospect of grandchildren), the talk turned to running.

Brittany loved running. Not as much as she loved Tuna, or her boyfriend Strype, but almost as much. She took a lot of pride in being so fast, constantly pushing herself to go faster. So it came as a real shock when her mother said that not only was Brittany the slowest healthy were-Cheetah she had ever seen, she was also slower than a one-legged were-Cheetah that her mother had known.

Running, it turned out, was one of the most important aspects of a were-Cheetah. Not having the birth rate of most other were-creatures, the Cheetah's survived on sheer speed. A healthy were-Cheetah could run (in short bursts) at the speed of sound. A were-Cheetah could tap into the mystical power of the Speed Force.

As soon as Brittany's mother had finished teaching her how to change forms whenever she wanted, she got to work teaching Brittany how to channel the Speed Force. As soon as Brittany's mother had disappeared, Brittany had sprinted out of the house, to see how fast she could go.

Eleven hours and forty five minutes later, she arrived back at her house. Without turning.

She had run around the world in twelve hours.

Which, as Gina was Nerding-out over, was two thousand miles an hour. Mach 2.6.

Nerd-tastic. Mega Nerd. T3h U33b3r Nerd. _La_ Nerd. Super Nerd. Nerd-meister.

Brittany had spent the last fifty nine minutes (which was to say, ever since Gina started trying to examine her) thinking up new ways of calling her sister a nerd. Gina was not impressed. Brianna was.

Brianna was the newest Diggers sister. Unlike her Brittany and Gina, she wasn't in her early twenties. She was about… three weeks old. Well, sort of.

Some weeks previously, Gina and Brittany had been exploring an Iraq-ian (Or Iran-ian, though Brittany had no idea which) tomb. They had found a few things of interest. One was a small rat which could beat them all up with Aura magic. Another was a shape shifter who had been imprisoned for several thousand years. The least exciting thing was the treasure that the tomb contained. Most of it had been stolen centuries ago, but the looters had left a single, worthless brass amulet behind.

A very, _very_ cursed amulet.

The two sisters had been cursed with bad luck. It had started as simple things, like tripping over a stone, or the elastic of Brittany's pants snapping. But their luck kept getting worse, until Gina decided that she had to get rid of it as fast as possible, or the moon would fall out of the sky to land on them. Gina had taken them to her lab, and, using some incomprehensible machine, separated the curse out of them- and into a human form.

Half human, half were-Cheetah, the newly created Brianna Diggers spent an exciting hour trying to kill her sisters, until their father managed to remove the curse from her, leaving Brianna as a perfectly sane and rational hybrid of two different species.

Brianna had Gina's brilliant mind, tempered by Brittany's average intellect and love of martial arts. This, somehow, combined into a genius who was obsessed with weapons. Guns, tanks, mecha, powered armor, anything that could shoot. Sometimes she helped Gina out in her with her experiments, but the rest of her time was spent tinkering with weapons and trying to figure out who she was as a person. Physically, she had the strength and speed of an Olympic athlete, with senses as strong as a human's possibly could be. According to Gina, the were-Cheetah DNA probably pushed Brianna's body to be as powerful as a human could get without turning into a Meta-human. The only physical blemish she had was a dark stripe which stretched from her left temple to mid-cheek.

"It doesn't make any sense!" Gina growled out, for the seventeenth time. "There hasn't been any physical change at all! My magic detector isn't picking up anything, YOU SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO DO THAT!"

Brittany rolled her eyes, and stopped what she was doing- waving her arm at supersonic speed. "Well, Nerd-ett, I can. So, are we done yet?"

Brianna looked up from a microscope. "Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way."

Gina blinked. "How so?"

Brianna stood up, cracking her back. "Well, Cyan (you know, Brittany's biological mother) said that were-Cheetah's can only run at 'super-speed' for short bursts- that's what stopped them from winning their war. There are two differences between Britt' and the other Cheetahs. She can go super-speed for longer, and she's not as scrawny as they are."

"Are you dorks calling me fat?!?" Brittany shrieked. The other two shook their heads in fearful synchronization. No one wanted to piss off a girl who's PMS turned her into a snarling beast- literally.

Gina blinked, and grabbed a notebook. Scribbling frantically, she started muttering to herself. "If the body's energy reserves contribute… but there wasn't enough energy in the body… so the body is using energy to access another form of energy… continuously open…. Ah HA! Got it!"

Brittany yawned. "Stop having a nerd-gasm and make with the 'splainy."

Gina had the grace to blush. "Well, I think I know what's happening to you. There are many planes of existence out there- Earth, the undead plane, Jade. Then you have the pocket dimensions- Eden, the Library. Then there are the… let's call them fractal dimensions. These are sort of a mix between the two- they overlay the universe, but don't directly affect it."

Brianna raised an eyebrow. "It looks like it's affecting it now."

Gina nodded. "Exactly. What Britt's doing is channeling one of these fractal dimensions through herself- both burning energy and filling herself with it at the same time."

"Um, translation?"

"You pull this 'Speed Force' into yourself, going faster than physically possible."

Brittany rolled her eyes, and stood up. "I had to sit here and be poked for an hour just so you could tell me what Cyan already did? You owe me. Eight cans of tuna."

Gina took off her coat. "Well, fine. But I did learn one thing you may find useful."

"Hmmm?"

"You're gonna get faster."

In 1/34 of the time it took to blink (Gina would check the camera's later) Gina found herself face to face with her sister. "What? Really!?!"

Gina nodded. "Yup. Each time you access this 'Speed Force' your body becomes better adjusted to it. You are gonna get faster. A lot faster."

"Yay!" Brittany squealed girlishly. "Come on! Let's go into town, and get that tuna!"

* * *

An hour later the three sisters were sitting down, eating ice-cream in the middle of Atlanta city. Gina nibbled on a chocolate cone, while Brittany and Brianna had a pair of triple-scoop tuna cones. Each.

"Hey! I know where we should go next!" Brianna volunteered. "Let's visit the Flash museum!"

Gina blinked. "That's a good idea. We might learn something about super-speed there."

The were-Cheetah (now in her tiny human form) took another slurp of her ice-cream. "Flash museum? Huh?"

Gina stood up, and the other two followed suit. "It was years ago- about five years after mom… anyway, back then there used to be heaps of superhero's running around. Flash was one of them, and he had super-speed."

"Oh yeah, I remember. Their space station fell down."

Brianna shook her head. "More like it blew up. No one's sure why. But the Flash lived here in Atlanta, and they made him a museum. It's full of Flash stuff."

* * *

"When you said stuff," Brittany growled (metaphorically growled, as she was still in her human form) "I thought you meant something useful, or at least fun. Not tourist crap!" Brittany, in her human form, was short. Very short and very blonde. Now, she was wearing a red tee-shirt which was a size too big, with a yellow thunder bolt on the front. Dangling from her ears was a pair of tacky (and hideously oversized) thunder bolt earrings.

"Look at the bright side," Gina said, wearing the same outfit. "These shirts allow maximum cleavage-viewing opportunities." It was true. The way the baggy shirt fell over her chest was enough to cause all passing men (and a few women) to stare, drool, and walk into streetlights.

Brittany sniffed. "Well, I have my muffin. I don't need to pick up guys."

Brianna yawned. "Well, the rest of us do. Unless you've reconsidered your monogamy-only policy with Strype…"

"That is NEVER going to happen," Brittany sniffed. "And I'll have you know that …" Whatever Brittany was about to say was interrupted by the sound of three fire engines and two ambulances racing past, sirens screaming.

"That's unusual," Gina noted. "Must be quite an emergency."

Brianna pointed at the TV's on display at an electronic shop. "Let's see if the news has anything to say about it."

* * *

The building must have been impressive, once. At six stories tall, it would have been quite imposing had it not been on fire. Flame and smoke obscured the entire top floor, and the red glow could be seen through most of the lower windows. Dozens of firemen had hoses turned on the blazing building, with minimal results. Outside, ambulances tended to wounded.

"This is the site of the Scarlet Hotel. As you can see behind me," The presenter gestured to the flaming building, "This once proud historical monument is going up in flames. As efforts continue to put out the blaze, one question is on everyone's mind- will they be in time to rescue the people trapped inside?"

* * *

The Diggers trio stared at the screen. Brittany sighed. "Damn it. I wish we could help them.

Gina looked mournfully into her backpack. "I didn't bring my remote Light-Gate activator, so we can't teleport to my lab."

Brianna rolled her eyes. "You know, for a genus, you're pretty stupid, sis. I'm glad I got some wisdom from Britt. We don't need any gadgets- Cheetah can take care of it."

Brittany stared at Brianna. "What? No, I can't! If people see me, they'll try and stick me in a zoo or call animal control or something!"

The youngest Diggers groaned. "I take it back. My wisdom came from the curse. Remember the last week at all? Cyan teaching you how to change forms whenever you want, instead of once a day? Super speed? Besides," she stared intensely at Brittany. "There is one kind of person with super-powers who doesn't go to prison."

There was a long pause, during which Brittany stared blankly at her sister, before the light of comprehension came to her eyes. "A superhero!"

"Just like WildHorse," Gina exclaimed, going into a brief (and X-rated) fantasy about the superhero.

Brittany dashed around the corner, into an alley. Mentally triggering the change, her body started stretching itself, gaining three feet in height, several cup sizes, and covering itself in a thick coat of spotted fur. Her normal ears disappeared as a pair of feline ones grew above them. A pair of vertical dark stripes formed on her face, one descending over each eye, and the change was complete. With a small sonic boom, Cheetah raced off.

* * *

At a busy intersection, a young girl stood patiently with her mother. Behind her sat a Rottweiler. In the rush of people trying to get back to work before their lunch break ended, someone stood on the tail of the large dog, causing him to bark madly.

In fright, the little girl ran away, right into the busy street. Her mother froze, as she saw her daughter standing right in front of a truck. "Stop!!!!" she shrieked, but she knew it was too late.

* * *

Cheetah was distracted from her race towards her target when she saw the small girl standing in front of the truck. No-one could possibly get to her in time- it was less than half a second before the truck would hit her.

For Brittany, that was more than long enough to eat a meal, and play a game of solitaire.

Scooping the child up, she zoomed over to the girl's mother. "Here you go- one little girl, in mint condition."

The mother turned white, and reached for her daughter with shaking arms. "Ohh… you're okay. I-I-I- thought…."

Brittany smiled at her. "She's fine. Now, gotta go!"

She blurred, and was off again. Keeping her speed below supersonic, she hurtled through the city. It was perhaps a minute after she left her sisters that she arrived at the Hotel. She came to a stop next to the Chief Fireman- at least she assumed he was the chief, as he was ordering everyone around. "Hi."

"Please- behind the tape," He said without turning to face her. "Let the professionals handle this."

Cheetah rolled her eyes. "How many people are left inside?"

"Look, I'm not giving interviews!" He barked at her.

Cheetah had had enough. She grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him to face her. The look on his face upon seeing her made her giggle. "People. Inside. Fire. Hot. Ring a bell? How many are still inside?"

"…. Seventeen, we think," he blurted out, "and three of our guys who got trapped when the fourth floor stairs collapsed."

The were-Cheetah nodded at him. "Gotcha. Back in a sec."

With that, she sped into the hotel. Each time she emerged, she had someone slung over each shoulder. Within half a minute, a pile of people had appeared on the ground. Finally, only one person was left inside. Unfortunately, he was trapped behind a collapsed wall.

"Come on, get out of there," Brittany grunted, her arms beginning to buckle under the weight of an entire wall. Even as strong as she was, this was getting a bit too much for her to handle. The fireman crawled out from underneath the wall, and Brittany let go as soon as she could. "You okay?"

The fireman grimaced. "Uh, no. I think my leg's broken."

Brittany took a moment to look it over. "Unless you've got an extra knee, I'd say you're right." She bent down, and scoped him into her arms, carrying him bridal style. "Let's get out of here."

Cheetah sped out of the room, only to be stopped by a wall of flaming debris. The entire corridor was on fire, and there were gaping holes in the floor. Brittany could make it out easily, but her companion…. "Okay- new plan. Close your eyes!"

Kicking a piece of rubble at the nearest window, Cheetah waited until the glass had fallen, then threw herself out of it.

* * *

The firemen were hard at work. Most of them were hosing the sides of the inferno- they had given up on extinguishing it, and had elected to try and contain the spread. Those few who weren't wrestling with the might of high-pressure hoses were keeping the crowd back.

"Look!" yelled one of the crowd, pointing at one of the windows. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared, as a burning cat-girl came hurtling out one of the highest windows, carrying a fireman in her arms. She hit the ground hard, cracking concrete beneath her. Groaning, she stood up, fur still on fire, but the man in her arms unharmed.

"I think that was the last one," she puffed. She put the fireman down, and the paramedics quickly abducted him. "Was anyone hurt?"

One of the police approached her. "A couple of broken bones. No one died though, thanks to you."

The Brittany beamed proudly. "Yeah, I'm pretty awesome."

One of the children watching from the crowd spoke with the volume and innocence which comes naturally to children. "Mommy, why is the cat-lady's hair on fire?"

The cat girl's eyes bulged. "My hair?!? Eeeeeeeee!!!!!!!" Shrieking, she sped into the path of one of the fire hoses, getting soaked. Her hair stopped burning.

As she emerged out of the water, the entire crowd stared at her. Unselfconsciously, she straightened out. Her soft yellow fur, covered in dark spots, her incredible height, her slightly sinister looking claws and teeth, all on display. It didn't show on her face, but she was incredibly nervous. Less than two dozen people in the world knew about the fact that she was a were-Cheetah, and now hundreds of people were watching her. Were they going to scream?

Fear was the last thing on anyone's mind. As she stood there, people marveled at how beautiful she looked. The way her tight, wet t-shirt showed off a very human, and feminine, physique made half of the crowd drool. The t-shirt itself bore the logo of the best protector the city had ever had.

The policeman swallowed. "Thank you for your help. If you don't mind me asking, who are you?"

Brittany beamed. "Call me Cheetah! I'll be your local superhero from now on!"

The resulting cheer was so loud that it hurt her super-sensitive hearing, and Brittany loved every moment of it.

* * *

Yes, lots of this chapter was re-cap for those of you who read Gold Digger. I want this to be read by people who read WildHorse and Batwoman, and it needed to be explained to them.

I'm experimenting with different writing styles for my stories. Batwoman: Legacy is first person, and a little angsty. I'm inspired by Film Noir style when writing that story. WildHorse: The Man of Steel has a hopeful tone. I'm inspired by old Superman comics, and some movies when writing that story. With Cheetah, I'm aiming for a cheerful, irreverent tone. That's inspired by Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.


End file.
